Word: pechstein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Rudely stated, German expressionism was the house style of radical figurative art in Northern Europe between about 1905 and 1930. But as Selz rightly insists in his catalogue essay, it was less a style than a cluster of attitudes. The major expressionist painters-Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Max Pechstein, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Lyonel Feininger-did have formal traits in common. Harsh, dissonant color that blared fitfully from an unrefined surface; jagged shapes, broken-bottle cubism, an appetite for the primitive in drawing; masklike faces, Gothic poses, extreme jumps of tone between limelight and gloom...
...show, however, make clear that primitivism was merely one means to an end. Though primitive objects and people appear in many of Die Brucke's works in the collection, these things are only elements of an artistic vocabulary; they are only symptoms, not causes of the artists' perception. Comparing Pechstein's Native Dances (1916) with Heckel's Bathers by the Alter River (1913), one sees that the stylistic traits are the same, though Heckel created his own notion of primitive society out of a jumble of African and South Pacific objects he found at hand in Germany, while Pechstein...
...common attitude toward German expressionist artists like Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner, Franz Marc, Karl Schmidt-Rottluffor Max Pechstein used to be that their work was a talented but provincial response to French Fauvism...